Monadnock, Winter Sunrise,

1919

Abbott Thayer established his reputation primarily with portraits of fashionable women evocative of his Parisian training. He soon gravitated toward a more subdued aesthetic, in which his subjects were invested with a serenity and solemnity suggesting an increasingly symbolic attitude toward painting. Such an approach culminated in the allegorical tableaux and images of classically garbed, often winged women he produced beginning around the time of his wife’s death in 1891, but also seems inherent in the hauntingly beautiful series of paintings of New Hampshire’s Mount Monadnock he created after moving nearby a decade later. The expressive peak exerted a powerful attraction for Thayer, serving as a spiritual and artistic touchstone. From his home, he painted repeated winter views of the dark forest leading up to the mountain’s snowy summit, often, as here, at sunrise. Obsessively conscientious about his work, Thayer evolved an unusual studio practice in an effort to obtain optimal results. Painting while flanked by assistants who copied his images brushstroke for brushstroke, the artist could alternate between versions of a single composition in the same state of completion while experimenting with different pictorial effects. He made little distinction between his original and these "duplicates," as he called them, moving frequently between them in a manner that obscured such divisions. <em>Monadnock, Winter Sunrise</em> is among the latest and most successful examples of Thayer’s Monadnock views produced in this way. The rising, sun-tipped shoulder of the mountain and its snow-capped peak beyond are echoed, as if in reflection, by the inversely descending edge of the wooded foreground, which seems bowed by the weight of the massive form above.